OK, so I actually sort of love the idea behind EverQuest II‘s latest bit of technical wizardry, but well, when I say “wizardry,” I mean less Gandalf and more the really clumsy kid from Harry Potter – millennia before he became improbably talented. Basically, though, EverQuest II will – via mic and webcam – soon be able to read your vocal and facial cues and translate them 1:1 into Norrath. Conceptually, that’s great! So long, demons of anonymity. Meet one of mankind’s most primal, utterly essential roots of communication. But, uh, can we maybe try this again in ten years or so? And without the frog person?

So then, that was nice and unsettling. I heard Satan tried to play that ogre voice clip backward one time, and his resulting realization that it was too much even for him caused Jack Thompson to be born. At any rate, grafting this sort of nuance-necessitating tech onto a nearly eight-year-old MMO probably isn’t the best idea.

And while it is – to be perfectly honest – incredibly fun to chuckle at, I’d really like to see something like this succeed one day. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people are truly wretched at communicating without vocal intonations, facial expressions, and body language. Most forms of online chat basically barrel clumsily right through those things, leading to all sorts of unnecessary rage and jerkiness. I love text. I love writing. So, as someone who’s been called an idiot on the Internet more than my fair share of times, I’ll you from firsthand experience: words are really, really hard.

But yeah, I’m reeeeally not feeling the frog people. Let’s never speak of that again.

I was sort of expecting Valve to do something like this when HL2 was first revealed and there was all the fuss over the (still not bested) facial animation. It’s a pity they haven’t. I’m sure they’d do better than some awful frog man.

Try ‘Enslaved: odyssey to the West’. Besides that the game is actually pretty ok, the facial animations are the best I’ve ever seen. I haven’t played the noir detective game though, but enslaved doesn’t have those horrible textures at least.

I remember really liking NOLF 2 graphics overall as it did many things really well. But my memory could be playing tricks on me. But I’m yet to see a better facial animation than L.A. Noire. It’s a shame the technology still haven’t been used for more games.

The problem with this is that people often try to get and edge in mmorpg games, is the base of the game for most people, so one of the way to win a edge is play zoomed out to see the battlefield and all monsters and dangers. Nobody zoom down enough to notice faces. Cool tech, anyway, and I hope is really added to everquest, … maybe machinima people will be able to do something with it, plus is the type of stuff that excite the imagination of 5 years old wen think about playing “adults mmo” in the future, so is probably something that will make so more young people start mmos.

I don’t see that as a problem at all; like the video says at the start, this is for role-playing. A lot of people do not role-play at all in MMOs, and the ones that do aren’t trying to do it during raids. This is for standing around in town pretending to be a frog or whatever.

The machinima aspect did not occur to me… that will probably be the primary application, now that you mention it.

The situations when you zoom out (eg raiding) won’t be the situations when the facial tech will be used. If only because the look of mild boredom/concentration on everyone’s face would get tiring. It’l be great for RP or general social situations though, essentially those times when you can afford to zoom in and stand around looking at people.

It’s for the “M” and “R” parts of “MMORPG”. Nice bit of social interaction work. I wonder if the hardest part is actually trying to get everything shunted down the pipes fast enough at MMO scale and syncing what might be two separate stream technologies for the voice and face data.

When they get this rolled out, the ERP crowd are going to have a field day. *eyebrow waggle*

Interesting, but I don’t think it will be of any real use in today’s combat focused social games. However, I am hoping to see games “mature”, that is – explore the potential more of social gaming and social worlds as non-violent arenas for interaction between people. I say that because I think you need to slow down the pace for people to bother looking at other people’s avtars as they talk. And slowness in games is possible: Exploration isn’t dead (Minecraft, Skyrim), building isn’t dead (Minecraft, Sims), socializing isn’t dead (Second Life is dated, but not dead). I also think slowness is a key component to making stories in games actually work. And I mean slow as in slow, not boring :)

But while computer vision is a tricksy beast, I don’t think they’re asking an unreasonable amount of it here…under fairly normal gaming conditions they can probably assume a static background, know that there’s precisely one face in the scene, and don’t have to distinguish it from any others: it’s almost entirely a shape-tracking exercise. For once, I don’t think the CV is the hard part of this.

Don’t encourage this. Money put towards facial recognition technology will primarily be used for creepy as fuck public surveillance. Let’s not encourage the games industry to pursue it as well. The police already get more than enough opportunities to spy on us.

This isn’t face recognition in the difficulty-and-biometrics sense, though. Unless they start showing it picking your right login by who’s sat at the PC, this is tracking shapes, and just about on the high edge of university CV coursework level (albeit with a ton more work beyond that on making it deployable and networked).

The sad part is, that actually looked kinda cool on the understated parts of the speech. Like the last “soon”, actually looks really good on the frog. They just have it dialed up to WAAAAY TOO EXPRESSIVE. Take a look at Krogan lip syncing and you can see they never got those huge Krogan mouths to spread open like it’s trying to swallow its own head. Less is more, guys!

I’ve been waiting years for someone to attempt this. I’m blown away that EVERQUEST 2 of all people is the first to market with it! I would have assumed something more social like second life would be the first.

I’m going to start playing Everquest 2 now. Its free to play, so shit, why not? I absolutely love the idea of actually ROLEPLAYING in an MMORPG.

I thought it was pretty cool, but I don’t normally have a camera or mic connected to my computer, and so it really doesn’t bother me.
Someone above mentioned machinima, and that would be pretty awesome. Also, I can imagine the potential for cyb0ring would be useful, as well. Oh, and probably RPers, but how many of them are in mmos anyway anymore?

I was wondering what people were so terrified of when I started watching it, then the talking frog started and then I wasn’t so much curious as horrified. That’s like those terrifying glitches where a 3D model suddenly warps and twists into some impossible shape and we see realms of non-euclidean geometry.

This reminds me though, whatever happened to that Kinect chat Microsoft was working on where your avatar would mimic you via the Kinect? Hopefully it’s going better than this.

That’s pretty cool technology. My guess, Nathan, with regards to the 8-year-old game is that this is sort of a pet project of this guy on the EQ2 team, who got the go-ahead to work on it in EQ2 as a test-bed to work out the technology for inclusion on, say, Everquest Next in the future. (That’s still a thing, right?)